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A BEAUTIFUL work of genius may be aptly compared to a beautiful woman. Good fenfe may be called its health, without which it cannot live, charming as its other powers may be. But tho a woman has good health, it does not follow that he is fair; nay we often applaud a morbidezza, or an appearance of fickly delicacy, as an improver of female beauty; and in this the compatifon fails. A work, as well as its prefent parallel, muft have the bloom and the features of beauty, with grace and elegance in its motions, to attract admiration. The bloom and fine features, the grace and elegance, of a work confift in its ftyle; which is the part that is most recommendatory of it, as outward beauty and grace are of a woman confidered as an object of fight.

THE bloom and the features of compofition lie in the verbage and figures of its style; the grace in the manner and movement of that ftyle.

A WORK, immoral and unwife, has yet been found to live by its ftyle, in fpite of these defects. Style is therefore a quality of writing

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equal, if not fuperior, to good fenfe: for the latter without the former will by no means preferve a work, tho the reverfe of the rule is true. Indeed a fine ftyle is commonly joined with good fenfe; both being the offspring of the fame luminous mind.

CAN a work live long which is defective in ftyle? Impoffible. Homer's ftyle is the richest in the Greek language. Style has preferved Herodotus in fpite of his abfurdities. Every ancient, who has reached us, has an eminent ftyle in his refpective walk and manner. Style has faved all the Latin writers, who are only good imitators of the Greeks. Terence is only the tranflator of Menander; Salluft an imitator of Thucydides; Horace is an imitator and almoft a tranflator in all his odes, as we may boldly pronounce on comparing them with fuch very minute fragments of Grecian lyric poetry as have reached us. Yet it was he who exclaimed

O imitatores fervum pecus!

Style has faved Virgil entirely, who has not the most distant pretence to any other attribute

of a poet.

GOOD

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GOOD fenfe I have called the health of a work without which it cannot live; but a work may live without much applaufe: and the first quality of writing that attracts univerfal and permanent fame was the subject of the prefent difcuffion. This we have found to be STYLE.

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LETTER

LETTER X.

10 your obfervations on the barbarism of fome modern cuftoms, may be added those which arife from the following lines of Juvenal, in his thirteenth fatire;

Cœrula quis ftupuit Germani lumina, flavam Cæfariem madido torquentem cornua cirro? Who would have thought that our fide-curls and frizzled toupee had fuch antiquity, but along with that fuch barbarism, as to be the fashion of the Germans ere they left their native woods? Tacitus in his excellent book of the manners of the Germans, mentions their twisting their locks into horns and rings, as he calls them. It is curious to obferve that a custom invented in the most barbarous times fhould again be brought into vogue at the most polite period.

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WE fee that both Juvenal and Tacitus have chanced on the fame appellation, in mentioning this strange piece of drefs: the curls bearing indeed a very strong refemblance to the horns. of animals. Happy Germans, will fome modern husbands be tempted to cry, whofe horns were only of hair! How would Juvenal ftare if he came into a modern affembly, and faw every man in the company have his horns, non fine cauda.

PERHAPS it has escaped you that the invention of hair-powder did not arife in the country of the plica Polonica, as fome malicious antiquaries affirm. Fauchet, in his Antiquités Gaulloifes, tells us that the kings of the Merovingian race were in ufe to powder the hair of their heads and beards with gold duft; an extravagance to which our beaux and belles may arrive in time.

FASHIONS may be laughed at, but must be followed to avoid greater evils.

LETTER

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